michael@hollinger.net
Archive for May, 2007
Project Big Green
May 11th
The PR blitz has begun. For the past year or so, I’ve been working with a team from across the globe to develop the technologies that bring these features to our entire product line. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s received.
PowerExecutive software, part of the IBM Systems Director portfolio, will now be available across all IBM systems and storage. Originally designed from IBM BladeCenter and System x, in November 2007 IBM will roll the free energy management technology out across IBM System i, System p, System z and System Storage. It is the only energy management software tool that can provide clients with a view of the actual power used, as opposed to benchmarked power consumption, and can effectively allocate, match and cap power and thermal limits in the data center at the system, chassis or rack level. By enabling power capping, clients can effectively run their systems on cruise control.
POWER6 has several different design features that lets us do things like this natively without having to resort to external measurements or approximations. Since IBM designs the entire system, we have hooks in the processor, system planar, and its management firmware. We also own the entire provisioning stack above that, so look out for interesting products that harness these underlying features in the future. As we begin to ship products, I’ll highlight some of the important technical features, and where applicable, explain how it was done.
Work’s great, especially when a customer that buys your product saves money in the long run. Oh, and it’s good for the environment too. 
NoWonder.com’s back!
May 6th
In the late 90′s I volunteered for a technical support service called NoWonder.com. I’m not sure how I stumbled onto that back then (nearly 10 years ago!), but I spent hours of freetime answering people’s questions on Macs, Windows 98, “Networking,” Modems, and anything else under the sun. Around 2000 they were bought, renamed ePeople.com, and started charging money for delivering support. I could place bids to answer questions, and make $50 / month helping people. It was fun, especially considering I could make some pretty good spending money on my PC, as a 17-year-old.
I just discovered (via Wikipedia) that NoWonder’s come back, and free once again! I probably won’t sign up for it, but if you need tech support and don’t feel like calling a helpdesk, give these guys a try. For the most part, I enjoyed helping people, and my fellow “mentors” and support specialists did a good job. It was fun, but every now and then I’d encounter a “12 o’clock flasher.” Watch the video for an explanation. Out of the hundreds of people I helped (A Google Desktop search proves I solved around 150 support issues), I maintained a perfect 5 / 5 rating.
There is nothing that beats the adrenaline buzz of configuring some guy’s DSL modem even though he’s running windows 3.1 on a 386 with four megs of RAM! – Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie
